C-E Translation of Children's Literature from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Abstract

Children's literature is a unique form that adds brilliance to present splendor of the literature. An effective translation is the precondition to restore the essence of Chinese children's literature. The research of history and theory in children's literature is marginalized and excluded. Because of the language barriers and the cultural differences between Chinese and English, it is difficult for target audience to get adequate cognitive context to understand the original correctly. Besides, the particularity of children's cognitive development makes the translation more challenging and tough. The translator of children's literature should adopt the most applicable approaches according to the children’s language ability so that they could easily achieve optimal relevance. This paper mainly discusses the application of the relevance theory on the phonetic level, lexical level, rhetorical level and cultural level.